Evaluation question 3

What have you learned from your audience feedback?

We hosted our world premiere of our trailer at a lunch time and invited a range of people to come to the viewing, and then fill out a questionnaire with their thoughts. We got a big range of responses both negative and positive. Of the quantitative data we have made some graphs to display this information.

Please circle the age range you fall into:

The group of people we got to watch were in line with the age group that is our intended audience. People of 15-24 and one in 25-30 (this was a very young teacher, i'd estimate around 25, not that it matters much though) this means all the results we get from them will hopefully be representative of how our audience will feel

Gender

For gender we got a larger distribution of woman coming to watch the trailer, this is inline with some of our research into gender bias of horror audiences, it also supports this as we got more interest from females to come and watch the viewing

ON average how many films would you watch in a month?

This shows us that the people taken the questionnaire do watch quite a lot of films, meaning thatchy hopefully have quite an expansive knowledge of films, in range and conventions of films.

Of these films, how many would be at the cinema

This shows that most of the people occasionally visit the cinema to watch their films, but also watch a lot at home in whichever way they do.

Do you have a preferred genre of film?

 The viewers displayed a large range of film tastes, meaning all together they all watch a lot of films in different genres. The largest genre seemed to be thriller, which is good as it is a genre that is aligned with us and shows they have experience and interest with the genre. A small percentage said their favourite genre was horror, which is representative of the general population as it is a bit of an enthusiast genre. This group however is representative of our total demographic.

What is the most important thing that would encourage you to go and see a film? (Smaller number indicates a greater importance)

Here we can see what people thought were the most important things that encouraged them to go and watch a film. The most important as they decided on average was an exciting trailer, this is understandable as the trailer is often the main exposure someone has to a film and it is able to showcase the film, its themes and storyline to the audience in a bitesize way without revealing to much about the film. The two next most important things were on average the recommendation of a friend and that they like the genre. The recommendation of a friend is very encouraging as likely it is someone who shares similar interests and values as you, and so recommends the film for a reason, Liking the genre means you like the formulas of certain films like for example horror, and so are already aware of some of the films themes. Next ranked was a good poster and enjoying an earlier film in the franchise, followed lastly by great reviews.

What genre do you think this film belongs to?

Everybody thought the film to be a horror film, meaning that they were able to instantly recognise the conventions and forms of horror films that we have employed, showing that we were successful of creating a film in our desired genre that was expressed to the audience and by the audience. Someone thought that it was in the sub-genre of satirical horror, I think they took an alternative reading of our trailer.

Who do you think might go and see this film?

This shows that we don't have a strong preferred reading towards a gender or have any sort of alienation towards a gender. Some have said that maybe more men would go and see the film as opposed to women, but i think this is simply a misconception of the horror genre and our research says otherwise.This is support for film, our film is reflecting current trends of audiences for horror films in that it is more gender equal than previous years.

What was your favourite part of the trailer and why?

For this question we got a large range of responses, as they are all qualitative data it is hard to evaluate them on the whole, however, as a look over all of them they have selected their favourite parts and given positive comments. Here are a few selected out:

"Background music was effective and not too imposing/overly dramatic, built up tension and suspense. Lighting used well. Set/general action was realistic and to not too contrived. " 

 "When kalyani dropped the plate the combination of sound and vision made me jump. A close second was when the camera approaches the couple sleeping as I felt a real sense of unease."

 "The montage because it had the most aspects of horror and made it seem more fast pace – but it wouldn’t of been good without suspense and build up from rest of trailer."

  

These comments can help us see what parts of the trailer particularly stood out to the audience. They have said that they enjoyed the way that the atmosphere was created and how the tension was developed throughout the trailer. They have enjoyed the combination of the music working with the video to help create the finished trailer.

Was there anything in the trailer that was less satisfactory? If yes please expand

This was the follow up to the previous question and asked people to detail things about the trailer that they didn't like, didn't understand or generally found less satisfactory. On the whole there were never any full specifics of the trailer that they didn't like, but more about the trailer as a whole:

"Slightly unclear of what was going on with axe/door – not the most clear portrayal of bad guy etc"

"Perhaps more of a hint towards the  motives of the attackers/ interplay between attackers/victims"

"Sometimes the sound didn’t synchronise with the image but maybe that was intentional."

The negative feedback overall showed us that some viewers didn't understand the story that was presented completely, this however is to be expected as everyone will have their own preferred readings of the text. The fact they are left slightly on the dark on some themes and are intrigued supports us as we have set out to place enigma codes in our trailer, these questions raised should hopefully encourage people to see the film. One thing to note that may also have increased misunderstanding, was that during the screening the audio skipped out of sync at around the start of the montage, this led to very annoying and sometimes confusing scenes and that sadly a lot of our audio engineering lost its effect.

In conclusion the audience feedback has been helpful, they have helped us get a very accurate idea of how our demographic and intended audience will view our trailer. The feedback given, if we were to redo the trailer, would be very useful in creating one that had any flaws ironed out an be targeted more. For example, creating a slightly more concrete representation of the villains and the main characters alike, which can help build the narrative of the whole trailer and to maybe include a few small plot points based off of audience feedback to support this.  And also to understand what parts of the trailer were liked and viewed positively, then possibly building on these parts to make them more effective, an such as how the shot with Kalyani and the plate made people jump. Overall the feedback has helped us to see how the trailer would be received if given out to the general population and what we can do to maximise its effect

NP AC

Vox Pops - Horror films and our trailer

Thoughts

The main thing people said about horror films was the emotions it can create, mostly focusing on the tension as opposed to being overly scary and jumpy. One commented on liking the films set in realism as opposed to more fantastical setting. Our trailer conforms to this quite well as it is not full of jumps and shocks and gore, but builds more tension throughout the trailer in a realistic setting.

What was nice about doing the vox pops was that we found all the comments were positive and supportive, which was very reassuring for our media text. They commented on their favourite parts of the trailer which was supportive as it showed that the trailer had stuck in their memory. One said that he was not expecting to be scared, as he had seen other media studies horror projects and had not been scared, but when watching ours he did have an emotional response. And comments that supported what we learnt from our audience feedback was that people would've liked to learn more about the characters in general, maybe learning more about who they are and what their motives are.

NP

Vox Pops - Ancillary texts

This Vox Pop was very useful as it gave detailed answers about what could be changed and if the tasks are overall successful. The feed back was overall positive, which is reassuring. Vox pops are esspecially useful for evaluating ancillary texts as they provide a fresh eye on the final outcome and also give an unbiased opinion and lets you know how a real veiwer will veiw it.

People tened to get what I was going for in my texts, such the house model and the bricks tying into the house they saw in the trailer.

AC